The Lets Read Podcast - 333: THERE WAS SOMETHING SINISTER BURIED UNDER MY HOUSE | 12 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 318

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about New Houses & Vacation IncidentsHAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inekt

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19 plus to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. A few years ago now, my wife and I welcomed our first child into the world. We were living in a one-bedroom apartment at the time, and while that was certainly okay for a young, childless couple, we knew that we'd need more room to start a family.

We started looking online and eventually found a suitable property in a pretty prominent part of our home city. But for reasons of our own personal security, that place will remain nameless for the rest of this story. The homes in this particular bit of the city were built by Celtic migrant workers almost a hundred years ago now and are known as being sturdy, reliable, and affordable places to live. As you can imagine, they were incredibly popular with just about every other wannabe renter. So when me and my wife saw one of the houses there was available, we jumped at the chance to book a viewing and put a deposit down. About six weeks later, we were moved in, and it felt every.

every bit the milestone that we thought it would. Our neighbors were warm and welcoming, and apart from the occasional busload of tourists, the area itself was actually nice and quiet. But then, the landlords proposed a rent hike. We were still very fresh when we got the news, so at first we had no idea how to really approach it. But then, right as we were approaching full-on panic,

we got the news that a renter's union was undertaking a little investigation on our behalf, and we had to wait a few weeks to get the news, but when we did, we were over the moon. The landlords were backing down on the rent hike, and we were only going to be looking at a 3% annual raise instead of a whopping 12%. Neither me nor my wife had any inkling of what the renter's union had discovered, and we assumed they'd found some kind of bylaw that prevented the landlords from such a steep hike. But nothing could have prepared us for the truth, nothing at all. The news about the rent hike was a stressful time for us, so I wasn't surprised when I started having these weird, recurring dreams. I just never expected them to be so vivid.

The dreams would always start with me returning home from an errand, such as a food shopping or a haircut, and I'd turn onto our street to find our house, unlike I remembered it. All the other houses were the same regular red brick with copper-brown trim, whereas ours was just jet black all over. The roof, the brick, the doors, even the windows appear to have been painted the deepest shade of coal dust black I'd ever seen. I'd approach the house with the neighbors watching me from their windows and open doors, but as soon as I unlocked the front door and walked inside my home, the dream would end and I'd wake up. I told my wife about the dreams and the things that I saw on them, but she agreed it was probably the stress of the move playing on my mind. I tried eating better, getting more exercise, and even stopped drinking alcohol altogether, but the dreams still wouldn't go away.

They just visited me less frequently. They weren't exactly a hindrance at all. I could still go about my business as usual, but seeing as I'd never have any kind of reoccurring dreams before, it was definitely something that played on my mind a fair bit and made me wonder if I should just go and see my GP about it. Now, part of the reason that I reckon that I could carry on as night, normal was because I worked from home. I was head of a customer service department for a major electronics chain over here in the UK, so 90% of my job involved working from my home computer to

take calls and resolve tickets. And this suited me down to the ground, as not only could I put in long hours with relative comfort, but it meant that I could look after our baby daughter while my wife was at work as a nurse. She also worked very long hours, you see, and very hard too, I might add, so it meant a lot to her that I could stay home with our daughter and make sure that she was well-looked after. And so one day I'm working downstairs in the living room and my daughter is watching cartoons. I made myself a cup of iced coffee and then set it down on the coffee table in the middle of the room. But then the next thing I know, my daughter kicks her legs while bursting out laughing, and she boots one of the table legs and the coffee goes spilling all over the floor.

It was a full cup, one of those big plastic coffee shod. shop cups too, so almost a full pint of ice coffee was spilling all over the hardwood floor. I rushed to get some paper towels and the anti-stain spray, not wanting to lose any money by voiding our deposit. But then when I got back, I noticed something strange about the spillage. It was sort of forming a puddle. The puddle was a rough circle, forming in the center of the floor. And every time I'd take a wipe at it, the liquid would take the shape of that same rough

circle again. I quickly realized there was a very subtle dip in the floorboards, one that must have been hidden with the rug that we'd moved when we decided to redecorate the room a little. And not wanting to end up getting charged for it, we reported the discovery to the landlords immediately. They sent someone over right away, just a general handyman, I think it was, and after a quick inspection of the floor, they told us that we need some serious work done to prevent the floor from rotting away completely. Using one of those tiny tube cameras, the kind that you feed into small places, the inspectors were able to determine that a series of short wooden supports had rotted away underneath the floor.

These had been attached to the home's foundations, but only in one section which appeared sunken, kind of like a well. And in short, we could get a hotel around the corner for about a week, and after maybe three or four days of work and a subsequent inspection, we'd be able to return our baby daughter to a safe, clean, stable home. But unfortunately, that's not quite exactly how things went down. We did as instructed and booked ourselves into a small hotel for a week, a very bare-bones place just a couple of miles away from our new house. Then, about three days into our week-long stay,

we got a call from one of our neighbors saying the police were outside of her house. Not just any police either. They were in a forensics van wearing those all-white cover-alls. I drove over as soon as the wife got home from the gym, because obviously I needed to know what was happening in our new house. But when I got there, the police turned me away at the door. They'd take my phone number and they'd be in touch once they knew what the situation was. But for the time being, we were in the dark and I had to stay away.

It took a week before the landlords called us to let us know that the work, was completed. When they did, I demanded a personal inspection before we moved back in, and the woman who called agreed to share everything she knew when I met her at the house. When I arrived, a brand-new matching floor had been installed, and everything looked just as I remembered it. I obviously didn't test the new floor by pouring a drink over it, but I was assured that the foundations had been renovated and that the issue was now resolved. It was then that I asked what caused the police to come round, because if it was serious enough to involve the law, it was serious enough that we needed to know about it too.

And that's when the woman sat me down over a cup of tea and laid it all out for me. First thing, they were offering a rent freeze for three years if we promised not to talk about this until after we'd moved out. And since we've been moved out of that house for a number of years now, I'm obviously free to talk about it now. The second thing was that the woman had sworn statements from not one, but two council-approved structural engineers, both of whom were happy to attest to our home's safety and security. So if we did choose to move back in, we could sleep soundly knowing that there were no structural issues. Those were all well and good, but what I wanted more than anything to know was to find out what was under our floor. And then after signing my

half of a 36-month rental agreement, she spilled the beans quite spectacularly. Almost a hundred years ago, when the streets and the houses were still brand new, a family had welcomed a child into the world. But this child was not one they had expected. I can't remember exactly what the poor child's condition was. I'm not even sure the authorities had it entirely sussed out either, but it was clear that, whatever it was, it was as debilitating as it was severe. She couldn't walk like other children.

She couldn't talk like other children. and by every estimation she didn't act like other children either. Then as a result, she never made it into double-digit ages. It's also clear that whatever happened to the poor girl, her parents couldn't find it in themselves to take her to the local cemetery. Maybe it was just too expensive to hire an undertaker or whatever, maybe they had a hand in her death. Either way, they evidently decided the best place for their dearly departed daughter

was under the house they built with their own hands. Since there was no one left alive to question and no one left alive to charge, the police simply moved the girls' remains someplace that they could properly dispose of her. After that, they closed their investigation and allowed the renovations to recommence. Then, after a week or so later, there I was, sitting in that exact same space, talking myself back into moving back in. There was just enough time for us to back out if we really wanted to. My wife still had to sign her part of the form as the second adult occupant, but even once I'd explained the whole situation to her, she thought the same thing I did. It was too late to start the whole process of moving again.

Doing it one time had been exhausting, so facing it all over again was just kind of unthinkable. Even if that did mean staying in a house with a hundred-year-old corpse of a severely disabled girl had been recently found. Once my wife had signed her half of the paperwork, we moved back in the next day, and over the next couple of weeks, I stopped having those weird dreams where I'd find our house had turned that sort of inky shade of black. The scariest part of the recurring dream was this. I'm a grounded scientific guy, but I don't have a hard time explaining the dream. For the renovations, when there was an illegal burial site under our house, who knows what kind of mold or spores or decay could have been drifting. up from that sepulchre underneath our feet, affecting my mental state or that of my loved ones.

I had dreams, similar dreams, but they were never quite the same. I'd turn on to our street after running whatever errand I'd been on only to find our house looking the exact same as all the others. No one would be watching from their windows, no one would be peeking out from around their doors. I'd just walk inside as per usual and then wake up feeling refreshed and clear-headed. And things carried on like that for years as if nothing had ever happened. And then one day, me and my wife decided that we wanted a little more room, and we moved into a three-bedroom house a couple of miles away from the first. My daughter still doesn't know what they found or why we had to move out of that new house for a week,

and I'm not sure she remembers any of it to begin with. Maybe I'll tell her one day, or maybe I'll show her the video you end up putting this story in if you do end up using this. Hopefully it'll make it an easier thing to handle, but I think the word hopefully is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. My name is Joseph and I'm from Austria. Many years ago I went on a long-aided dream holiday to Paris, France. I had always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, walk along the Rue de Fabore Saint-Anne,

explore the catacombs, and visit Notre Dame Cathedral. It's such a tragedy of what happened to that. But I finally saved up enough money to take the time off from my job as a chef and surprised my girl with a trip to the city of love. We drove there from our home country of Austria and had a nice road trip on the way, staying at various locations and making many happy memories. Then we reached Gaye Perry.

It really was the most romantic city. We dined under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower and the twinkling city lights. We took long walks along the seine and made love in our hotel room with the windows open to the late-night city. Apologies, if this is not appropriate to share, but we Europeans are just sort of a free people who are not ashamed of our love for beautiful women. It was perhaps our fourth day in Paris, when myself and my lover Amelia were seated in a cafe awaiting our latest delectable taste of French cuisine. I had parked our car on the street outside. There was a parking space next

to it, and I thought nothing of it, as the average car would be able to fit in there. A man came driving along and idled beside the space. The movement caught my eye and I watched him with some curiosity, as I am always interested to see how other people maneuver into parking spaces. I forget the brand of car that this man had, but it was clearly too big for him. He did not possess the necessary skill to navigate into the parking space. Instead of giving up and moving on, however, he began to use his vehicle to shunt the cars on either side of the space in order to widen the gap. My car included, of course.

Shunting a parked car like that can shatter the steering column or the axles, and this absolute oslock was going hog-wild doing it to my car, and that of the hapless stranger parked adjacent to me. Naturally, I rushed out of the cafe and into the street. I yelled at him, in German, forgetting myself for a moment, and he pulled his car to a stop, pushed against mine, and, and climbed out. This man was a burly, dirty-looking dock worker type who fit every stereotype of the rough and vulgar Frenchman that I'd ever seen growing up. Nothing like the actual people I'd encountered in Paris thus far, I might add. I could tell that he didn't understand a word that I was saying to him in German, but my French is pretty merda, so I tried English. I told him that he

would damage my car and the neighboring car in his own car too, and to stop being a devil Depp and go and park somewhere else if he wasn't able to fit a stupid vehicle in the space. And the man called me a filthy Spanish pig and then told me to go back to Spain. I raised an eyebrow at him and called him a slur that I probably shouldn't have said, a very rude word in Austrian that sounds a little like foot but means something very different. And this was a big mistake because apparently he understood enough to know what I was insulting him with. And this burly man almost leaped over the hood of his car.

and came running towards me. He jabbed one huge finger right into my chest, almost knocking me backwards as he did so. I really hope that Amelia would stay in the cafe and not draw attention to the fact that she was with me. Now this road rage Frenchman began to yell at me, and spit was flying from his lips. Now in English, I asked him to politely back off,

but instead he grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall. He put one fist next to my head, in a clearly threatening gesture and began screaming right into my face. In that moment, I understood why they become roger rage incidents, because I felt the anger burning inside me too. How dare this boorish man yell at me and get spit in my face. I was a visitor to his city. Besides, he was the one who had repeatedly shunted that car like some moronic bull. So I said this to him, try my best to seem angry and threatening, and then shoved him backwards to get him off of me. Now, this was a huge mistake. The Frenchman

barely budged, and then sneered at me and started laughing. He drew his fist back, ready to clock me in the jaw. I ducked, and then he punched the granite wall behind me. Now, no sooner had he started to howl that I delivered a kick to his nether regions and ducked under his arm. Now, I probably should have kicked him harder because it did absolutely nothing to slow the enraged French driver down. He reached out to grab me, and I could see actual murder in his eyes. He was snarling and frothing like some kind of drunken animal, and I'm sure he was indeed plastered even though it was only three in the afternoon. My moment of confidence was over. I bolted, running from that angry driver down the street calling for help. Paris, which had once seemed such a romantic and wonderful

place, now seemed hostile and uninviting to me. Passers-by looked on with just blank dismissal as I thundered down the sidewalk, my lumbering aggressor behind me. Thankfully, I was fitter, healthier, and smarter than him. I darted through a crowd, then across a courtyard, and eventually found myself looking at the Louvre Pyramid. An art gallery and museum seemed like the perfect place to lose a man such as this, so I darted past the glass structure, ducked into a building, and quickly found a public toilet. I hid in there and called Amelia on my cell and asked her to keep an eye up for the guy. She told me she was still in the cafe and that the police had been called,

and the man's car was being clamped and towed. I stayed in the line with her as she described the next scene. The angry driver returned to his car and saw officers milling around the vehicle. I suppose in his drunken stupor, he mistook one of the officers for me and began to grab him, and then got forcibly thrown to the ground and subdued with baton. cons. Amelia described it to me as I cowered in the bathroom, and I have never been more grateful in my life to miss out on something. The man in his car were carted away, and I have no idea what became of him, and I really don't care to know. Thankfully, our car was undamaged, and we enjoyed

the rest of our trip to Paris, but I have never trusted French drivers to park their cars properly to this day. My name's Adam, and I'm from Leeds here in the UK. and a few years ago, myself and my parents and my sister moved into a new house not too far from our old one. It was a semi-detached place in a quiet street with a neat front gardens and old-fashioned street lamps. We had nice neighbors, too, at least on one side anyway, who called over to introduce themselves with some cake and a cup of tea. But those were the neighbors in the houses surrounding us. The ones in the house attached to ours was very, very different. They didn't smile, they didn't wave, and they'd either ignore us if they saw us in the street

or stare from their windows if they got the chance with these very cold, unfriendly stares. Mum said to ignore them. Dad said that some people were just kind of like that. So rather than do anything silly to try and make them like us, we did our best to just ignore it and settle in and not let it bother us. Despite all that, the first couple of weeks were as normal as we could expect. I went to the same school, got used to playing football in the new garden, and helped mom and dad unpack boxes of garden furniture. Friends and family stopped over to check out the new house, and while they were mostly interested in the new place, they'd sometimes ask about the neighbors and what they were like.

Mom used to say that they were quiet. Dad used to say that he'd met nicer people, and my parents never said anything overly bad about them, but people got the message. They weren't the friendliest of neighbors, and that was that. I sometimes used to wonder aloud why they were so unfriendly with us, but I never got an answer. Mum said that we should just leave them alone, and hopefully they just carry on leaving us alone, too. But as it turned out, just living next door to them was a liability. One night I was up in my room playing a bit of FIFA when I heard these noises outside.

It sounded like car doors slamming, footsteps on the path outside and low voices. It sounded extremely suspicious, so I got up and peeked out my window to see what was going on. In the driveway of the house next door, I saw shadows moving in the dark. I couldn't see faces just sort of hooded shapes moving around. Then seconds later, the shapes piled into a car and sped off. I told myself it was nothing that maybe the neighbors just had some late visitors, and then I went back to playing video games. but not before leaving my window open, something I look back on as a kind of like fate at this point.

I say that because maybe only a minute or two later, I started smelling something burning, and then I heard the shouts outside. I ran to the window and saw flames all over the front door of our attached neighbor. Not just inside either, outside too, with these bright orange and yellow flames making their driveway glow. as smoke climbed into the air. I grabbed my phone and called 9-99. Then when Dad heard me asking for the fire brigade, he came running to see what was happening.

He took one look at the flames and then shouted us to get out of the house. All of us ran outside right away, grabbing only what was essential before standing on the pavement in our socks or bare feet. It seemed like the whole neighborhood was gathered out there by then, watching from their driveways or the street outside their homes. Apparently, the neighbors that had been targeted weren't home. We knew because

their car was gone. But just the thought of them being targeted like that was still deeply shocking to us. A few minutes later, the fire engines arrived and men in heavy gear jumped out before hosing down the flames. Everyone cheered when the fireman finally put out the fire, but the neighbor's house was still a mess. The firemen checked our house too to make sure that there was no danger or risk or anything. They said the fire hadn't spread to our side, but the smell of smoke still clung to everything and made it so we couldn't just kind of carry on and try to forget. We went back inside, but I couldn't get to sleep for ages thanks to the adrenaline and that grim, burned smell. The next day, some police stopped by to ask questions and take statements.

I don't think they'd even finish before word got around to us. The fire wasn't some accident. It was a deliberate attack, just like we'd suspected. And that was the first time that I heard the word arson, and it wouldn't be the last. The only questions left were things like, who would do something like that and for what reason? And then we heard about the other fire. Just a few nights before ours, a house on the other side of the city had burned in an almost identical

arson attack, and it didn't take long before the police started to think that the two fires were somehow connected. Everyone reckoned that it must have been some kind of retaliation, and the fact that neighbors weren't home at the time made us think they probably knew that it was coming, and probably knew who did it, too. It probably explained why they were so standoffish with us, too. If they had those kinds of beefs going with people, it was probably just their default setting to be wary and cautious of strangers. Maybe they knew they were putting ourselves at risk just by living next door to them and didn't want to get close because they knew that it had further put us in harm's way.

And the neighborhood was quiet for a while after that. As the one who saw the fire start, I couldn't help but feel jumpy at times. Every noise made me think of footsteps or car doors. Mom and Dad tried to act normal, but I saw them watching the street too, especially when the moving truck showed up and started helping the neighbors move out. In the weeks after, nothing else happened. There were no more fires, no more strange noises, and slowly but surely the neighborhood got back to normal

as kids felt safe enough to play out in the street again. The neighbor's house stayed empty for a while with a first sale sign out in the front, and it stayed like that for ages as the grass grew tall in their garden. They were gone, but their house was a reminder. a dark, broken thing next to ours that took years before the estate agents found a buyer. I've never forgotten what happened and how that night could have been much, much different should that fire have spread any quicker. A few years ago, I went on vacation from the States to Eastern Europe.

Now, I don't want to say exactly which country I went to, because it was most definitely wonderful and I don't want to give it a bad name. I did a lot of traveling around the country, and while most of the places I visited were, great, with awesome people and some pretty sick food, just an awesome time in general, there were a couple of joints that were absolutely seedy as hell. One of them was a town I'll just call Hellville. I stayed here for a week when I was backpacking, and I was meeting a female friend a week

later and planned to spend a bunch of time with her. So for now I was just kicking back and exploring this little town of Hellville that I found en route to her digs. I could tell that it was a sketchy place as soon as I had. hopped off the bus into town. It had a vibe kind of like Eli Roth's hostel, and my dumb self found that pretty exciting. I'd joke the whole time before my vacation that I was going to stumble across some Backwood's village where the locals kidnapped tourists for the entertainment of rich sickos, and I was almost excited by the fact that this place looked like it had potential. Yes, I know

that I was, and am, an idiot. The first night I got way too drunk in the local Hellville dive bar, almost got into a fight with a Chechnyan ex-military guy, until we realized it was a big misunderstanding and ended up dancing and singing through the streets. Matias became a good buddy then, and we exchanged cell phone numbers. He was backpacking through Europe, too, and in our drunken stupor, we worked out that our routes would intersect a bunch more times, so we should look each other up.

Feeling good for making a new friend, especially a badass Czech former soldier, I collapsed into bed in my hostel, being snapped at to shut the F up by more than one angry traveler. The next day, I went to exploring Hellville. There wasn't really much to explore, just a few unhygienic-looking bars and cafes, a central square with an honest-to-god village well in it, which I was certain would give me cholera, and then a bunch of farmland. I took a stroll through the countryside to see if I could find any of those classic European milkmaids

hard at work in the fields. Sadly not, but I did spy a few gruff-looking farmers in a group of teens and tracksuits that I didn't really like the look of. They were sitting on a fence, chattering in their language, and I could tell that they were talking about me because they were pointing at me and then whispering to each other and laughing. Despite being my arrogant self, I decided to make like a tree and split. I tried to look as casual as possible, but quickly broke into a jog. Now my heart's saying, as I heard footsteps and the sound of teenage voices behind me. A couple of them sprinted ahead to catch up with me

and stood blocking my route back into town. There must have been five or six guys in total, four eventually facing me and then two big meatheads blocking off the return path. One of them pointed to my shoes and said something about trainers. I didn't understand for a moment and then he muttered something about Nike's and then sneakers. I remembered Europeans referred to sneakers as,

trainers and then realized that he was saying that he liked my Nikes. I said back, yeah, that they were nice sneakers, but very cheap ones. Now, this was true, they were probably only a hundred bucks, nothing to get excited about. This caused the teens to start laughing cruelly and then the obvious ringleader pointed at my shoes again and referenced that damn Daniel meme from years ago. I politely laughed and he began to shove me, saying something in his language that I didn't understand. I could tell from his body language that he was asking why I was laughing in him, though, which I'm sorry, but I thought that that's what you're supposed to do when someone says a meme, even if it's an ancient dead one. I had no idea how to convey it to this guy, though, who

clearly just wanted to start trouble with me. His buddy, a fat pig-looking guy with a Michael Sarah bum-fluff mustache, also pointed at my shoes and told me to take them off in some broken English. Now, under no circumstances was I going to give these A-holes my sneakers. They might have been cheap Nikes, but they were mine, and they served me pretty well on my backpacking trip so far. I told them F off, and then realized that this might not be a good idea when there were six of them and one of me. I turned to leave and realized that one of the bigger guys blocking my path was actually carrying a knife. Now, it was only a Swiss Army knife and looked rusty as hell, but I didn't really like my chances of survival if that thing went into my gut.

I was surrounded on both sides, so I did the one thing they hadn't counted on. I leaped the fence to my right and began to sprint across the fields like I was back in high school track. These teens started yelling and shouting, and I heard a crash from behind me as they leaped and toppled over the fence. One of them, probably the fat kid, had fallen to the ground and tripped a couple of more of them up. I continued to sprint, glancing over my shoulder and saw that three of them were still following, including the leader and the one with a knife. Now, this knife guy wasn't that fast, but the leader was leaping over ditches and all sorts of stuff

and clearly knew the land better than I did, so he was gaining on me. I kept running, looking for help of some kind, any kind. Did they even have cops patrolling the streets here? I certainly hadn't seen any kind of law enforcement. Hell, I'd take a miserable-looking farmer at this point. Surely these teens wouldn't stab me to death from my sneakers in front of the villagers. I had no idea what the place might be like, though. My mind went back to how I'd joked about looking for a town like in the movie Hostel,

and I cursed myself for being such an idiot. I wasn't even going to die in a cool way by having my eyes cut out or my wiener fed to dogs or anything. I was going to get murdered in the middle of some ass backwards nowhere, place just because these kids wanted my hundred-bucked sneakers. Hell no, I thought. I doubled my efforts and leaped across the fields, vaulting a fence or two in order to escape my pursuers. A stone whistled past my head, and then another, and I realized the teens had stopped to scoop up projectiles at some point, and I was now in serious danger of getting

my skull cracked as well as a knife between my ribs, probably. A voice in the back of my head told me that Maybe I should just hand the sneakers over, but my ego wouldn't allow it. Instead, I managed to run to the village. The first place I thought to go was the local bar, and thank all that is holy, my ex-military pal Matyas was actually sitting at the bar, just nursing a Coca-Cola or something and chatting to the barkeep. Now, I quickly ran up to him and told him that the kids were trying to kill me. He started laughing, patted me on the back, and said that he was sure that I could look after

myself. And for some reason, he thought that I meant little children were trying to kill me. And I frantically insisted that, no, it was a gang of late teens, one of them had a knife, and they were also throwing rocks. And the door burst open, and the three pursuers came in. The bartender said something in her language that I could tell was probably derogatory, and the ringleader of these youth snapped something back. Matias jumped to his feet, knocking a stool over and stood towering over even the biggest of the three teens. In that moment, I saw F around and find out playing out in real time. Matias reached around the back of his belt and produced a small bag,

which I realized was some kind of military-looking club. He slapped it against his palm and stepped forward. The kids froze, unsure whether to size up to Matias or run. In the end, the bartender made the decision. decision for them. He stepped out from the back room, shotgun in hand, and pumped it and pointed it at them. The boy started frantically apologizing, and the barman yelled something that I later found out meant, I'm going to tell your fathers and you'll be getting the beating of a lifetime. Matias and the barman explained to me that American sneakers are a valuable commodity to the teenagers

in that country, and I should probably wear older, crappier-looking shoes if I'm going to travel around there. And Matyos even promised to hook me up with a pair of his army boots, which later he did. Now, they were three sizes too big for me, but I wore them with pride and still own them to this day. That night, Matias and the barman treated me to a few drinks, and Matias regaled me with some tales from when he was in the military. And all I can say is that I'm glad he and I did not get into a fight the night before, and I'm almost happy for the teens that they backed down when they did. man, Matias can be scary at times, and I'm still in touch with him to this day via email sporadically. He travels Europe like some kind of Jack Reach or Drifter only without the wild adventures,

but I like to think that if he needed to throw down, he would. Now I moved on from Hellville the next day and went to visit my female friend early. I was not sad to be out of that village, and looking back, I cannot believe how dumb I was to fight for my life instead of just handing over those damn sneakers. But on the other hand, they were nice sneakers and I paid for them with my own money. No deranged European kids get to steal my shoes. My name is Terry, and this is a story from back when me and my family moved into our first real home together. So back in 1994, my wife and I and our two kids moved into a big house down in the quiet Texas town. The house was very old but very beautiful,

with huge bay windows in a massive backyard. And the yard was maybe half the size of a football field, and it was filled with thick grass and old trees. But while my wife, Angie, and I told ourselves we'd explore every inch of it before we moved in, we had much more pressing issues at hand. And so the whole thing got put on the back burner until much later on.

We loved the open space, and as long as we did the occasional snake check to make sure that there were no rattlers around, the backyard seemed like the perfect place for our two kids to play. And that house felt like a fresh start, a place to make memories, and for the first few weeks nothing could have been better. But then, my two kids found something that changed everything for us. Sarah Jane was 10 and Jack was 8, so they were just as excited about that backyard as we were.

Once we made sure that there were no unexpected hazards, and we'd given most of the lawn and little trim, the kids were free to chase each other around all over the place. But then one afternoon, they came running inside looking very excited. Then, when their mom asked them what was going on, they explained how they thought that they had actually found buried treasure in the backyard. I followed them outside, curious and not worried at all, and they led me to a spot near the back of the yard where we'd had a gardener trim back the bushes.

And there, half buried in the ground, was a heavy metal door. It looked old and rusted at the edges, with a thick lock holding it firmly shut. And I hadn't noticed it before. Angie and I must have missed it, and the landscaper must have thought that we knew about it already. Now, the kids begged to open it, but I told them to stay back. Jack said that it was buried treasure, left there by a pirate, and I told him whatever it was, it was probably not any kind of treasure.

Pirates keep their treasure in bank accounts these days, not underground in chess. And the door looked heavy, but after clipping off the lock with a pair of bolt cutters, I managed to pull it open which revealed a dark staircase which led down under the ground. And the air smelled damp, cold and rotten, no place for any kid to be. So after making them promise not to go down without my permission, I grabbed a flashlight from the house and shone it down into that hole. And the steps were concrete, and while they looked pretty worn, they appeared very sturdy for their age. I told the kids to wait where they were, and I assured them that I'd share anything I'd found and then went down alone.

Now, just seconds later, my flashlight was lighting up a small room at the bottom. But it wasn't just a room. It looked more like a bunker. It was small, just a single room with concrete walls and a low ceiling. A metal cot sat in one corner with a thin stained mattress lying on it. And then there was a rusty sink bolted on the wall and a toilet attached to the same wall close by. The fixtures looked very old, just like everything else. But when I walked up to the sink and turned one of the faucet knobs, water came out,

water that was both clear and cold. I figured the place had been abandoned long ago, that maybe it was some cold war relic that had been. Thankfully, never had to serve its purpose, but I was wrong. Someone must have been living down there and pretty recently, too. A single light bulb hung from the ceiling, flickering when I pulled its chain, and that's what I saw, the scratches on the walls. Deep and uneven, like someone had clawed at them with nothing but their fingernails. Suddenly freaked out by what I'd seen, I climbed back out and closed the door behind me.

The kids were waiting very wide-eyed and excited to hear what I had to say, and so you can imagine their disappointment when I told them that the bunker was entirely off-limits. And they tried to argue with me at first, and I had to scare them a little to make sure that they listened by claiming that there might be monsters or even mean wild animals living down there. And that didn't feel great having to spook my own kids, but as any parent will tell you, you sometimes got to lay down the law if you want to keep your kids' actions.

actually safe. And that night, my wife and I talked about what I'd found and we agreed that not only should we stop the kids from ever seeing what was down in that bunker, but that we'd better call the cops to let them know what we'd found. The bunker was very unsettling to me. You see, to me, it wasn't just some normal place for storms or maybe even bombs. It might have been built for that, and it might have also served that purpose at one time. But when I saw it, it was almost like a makeshift prison cell. The scratches, the cot, the working plumbing, I felt like they told a story that I didn't want to know. They felt like a secret that we didn't want to be a part of, and we didn't want that secret in our new home. Two sheriff's deputies stopped by the next day

after we called. They followed me to that bunker, and I showed them the metal door in the room below. One of them wrote down some notes while the other asked a bunch of questions, and they checked the sink in the toilet, noting that the water was still working, and agreed that that was probably not a great sign. They also found a small chain bolted to the floor near the cot, something that I hadn't seen during my first visit down there. It looked kind of rusted, but it was still very strong, and my skin wanted to crawl off my bones when I saw that. Stating the obvious, one of the deputies said the bunker was likely used to hold someone, and probably against their will. They didn't say much else, but their faces were obviously very pale as they said this,

and they told us that we weren't in any trouble, that we'd done the right thing and reaching out to them. But for the time being, we were to keep that bunker locked. They would investigate and let us know if they did find anything. And that same day I drove over to the Home Depot in town bought a brand-new padlock and re-locked the door to that bunker. I told our kids, obviously, to stay away from it. They nodded, but I saw this very deep curate. curiosity in Jack's eyes, like it was another conspiracy to keep him away from the treasure that we'd found down there. And it made me glad that I bought that padlock. It was the only thing

stopping him from going down there and seeing all the stuff for himself. And at that age, seeing dark stuff like that can have a terrible effect on a child's mind. The house felt different because the yard didn't feel safe anymore. And I tried to forget it and move on, but every time I was out there in the yard, my mind went to that bunker and all those scratches on. the wall. Who had been kept down there? For how long, and most importantly, why? The cops called us back a few days later, but they didn't have the answers we needed. They said they found no records of the bunker anywhere in any files or documents related to the property, and the home's previous owners also claimed no knowledge of it. They were all the way up in Oklahoma and had never

visited the property. And then the folks who likely had it built were dead, and they were basically no one to talk to or a question that had any solid answers for them. And as a result, the sheriff's department couldn't say who built it or when. And they also found no evidence of a crime, so even if there were folks around to arrest, there was really nothing to charge them with. They told us to keep it locked for safety reasons and that naturally we had the right to concrete it over if we wanted to, maybe to grow a lawn over it, anything we wanted. And I remember thanking them for the time, but also thinking that it was all just kind of pointless. The bunker stayed sealed like a very dark secret that we kept buried in our backyard.

I checked the padlock every week making sure that it was staying and I didn't want anyone or anything getting in there, least of all one of our kids. And years had passed by and the kids started to grow up and the bunker stayed off limits, but I knew that they probably still thought about it, especially our son. Sometimes I saw him glance at the bushes that we grew in the backyard, right over where the door was hidden. He didn't talk about it often, but it was always there, almost like a black mark that we couldn't ever wash clean. Angie and I tried to make life as normal as possible for Jack and Sarah Jane.

We had backyard barbecues, played some football, and succeeded in filling in the house with joy and laughter and some happy memories. But that bunker was always in the back of our minds, and how could it not be when it was just right under our feet? and as the years passed, Sarah Jane and Jack moved out. Sarah Jane went to college while Jack got a job in another city, and the house felt empty without them. But I was glad that they were finally away from that thing.

Angie and I stayed there, but the house felt a bit too big now, and any time I was out in the backyard, I just avoided that corner where the bushes hid the door. One night, I woke up at maybe 1 a.m. to take a bathroom trip. I figured that I'd heard it when washing my hands, but when I turned off the faucet, I heard it. This low scraping sound, like metal on stone and was coming from the backyard. I quickly made my way downstairs,

grab my pistol with a little flashlight attachment that I had bought specifically for home defense, and then went out in the backyard. It was cold and almost pitch black out there, but after walking across the lawn, I pushed through the bushes near the back and checked the lock on the bunker door. The padlock was still there, but the dirt around the door looked disturbed like someone had been digging. I told myself it was probably just an animal, maybe a raccoon, but I couldn't convince myself and the part of me thought that maybe it was Jack, but that seemed insane.

Another part of me thought that it was whoever had owned the house before, maybe even the person who had been kept down there. Firstly, I want to begin the story by saying that I do think Egypt is a lovely country. It's populated by many wonderful people, and I have friends that are both immigrants and natives. I have visited the country again since the incident I'm going to tell you about, and I enjoyed my time there. Unfortunately, though, there's no avoiding the fact that attitudes to women in Egypt can be unpleasant. Things are a bit more relaxed in the country in 2025, but when this occurred in 2011, it could be extremely risky for a woman to walk around by herself,

especially uncovered. A lot of Egyptian women wear hijabs or nikabs covering their hair, or almost everything apart from their eyes. Of course, Western non-Muslim women visiting Egypt just dress how they normally would, but this can be dangerous and downright stupid if you're alone. And as such, when I first visited Cairo, it was strongly advised that young women cover up as much as possible, make sure that they're with a male chaperone and stick to the touristy areas.

I was most excited about seeing the pyramids and exploring the deserts, and I wasn't even particularly thrilled about spending a few nights in central Cairo before we began our proper tour. Our tour guides insisted that it was totally worth it, though, and we needed to experience the city to experience Egypt. As I followed the tour group through the bazaars, taking in the sights, the sounds, and the smells, I was starting to get one over. My dad was engaged in animated discussion with one of the guides, and they'd become fast friends. Mom just seemed happy to look at the rugs and ornaments for sale, and all the other middle-aged tourists were cooing and awing over the sights. I was the only young woman in her early 20s, and there was a guy my age on the tour group, too, but he'd opted out of this afternoon's city tour due to food poisoning, which was really because he was hung over from the night before. Nobody was really paying attention to me, nor did I to them, which is why I didn't notice at first when I lost sight of the tour group.

At first I didn't panic. They couldn't have gone far. But when I turned down the next alleyway and found myself in a crowd of unfamiliar Egyptian faces, it did cause me to pause. A few of the older male store owners were looking at me a little strangely, their eyes traveling up and down my body, even though I was wearing jeans in a long-sleepped t-shirt, the best compromise I could make in this heat. I got pulled along by the throng of the crowd,

and before I knew it, I'd been kind of forced into another side of the alley, ducking out of the flow of people just so I could get my bearings. A few young men stood in a doorway, and I knew immediately that they were trouble. They sort of strutted over towards me in the way that certain guys do, and the way they studied my body made the previous store owners looked reserved.

They looked at me with a barely disguised, hunger, and I swear to God, one of them even licked his lips. They started talking to each other in Arabic, and I couldn't understand what most of them had said, but recognized the word for cattle or cowl and girl. One of them said something that caused the others to hoot and clap his buddy on the shoulders. I quickly apologized for disturbing them, which was a mistake. I shouldn't have acknowledged them or made eye contact. Before I could step back out of the alley, one of them grabbed me by the wrist

and pulled me deeper into the shadows. My blood immediately ran cold. I knew exactly what they wanted to do to me and what the things that they were saying meant. One of them pinned my arms behind my back, while another one started to lift my t-shirt, running his fingers over my stomach. I felt sick and knew that this was it.

If I didn't do something now, then this was going to be an event that would define the rest of my life, whether I wanted it to or not. I drew on all myself to, defense training and slammed my body back into the guy holding my hands. He hit the wall with a thud, letting go of my wrists. Using the momentum, I kicked forwards at the guy who had been touching me, slimming his head backwards against the first guy's nose as I did so. I heard a crunch and a scream

and quickly pulled free as two of the guys howled in pain. The third guy had been watching, but he was the one that started to chase. I had no idea where I was running to or how I could find safety, there was every chance that I'd just run into more angry young men who were looking to tear me apart. I can't even describe the chase because it was all some blur. All I know is that the man chasing me grabbed my hair and shirt at least a few times, including one where he tore a chunk of the hair out of my scalp, causing me to cry out in pain. It felt like I'd never escaped him. Everywhere I went, crowds were surging forward, and it was only later that I learned that I was on the outskirts of a goddamn armed riot. And I think that's what saved me. Eventually, I burst into

a courtyard and saw my parents in the tour group. They all looked frantic and defensive, and I guess that's why our one tour guide who'd befriended my dad was holding a brick. He barely paused as I came sprinting into the courtyard, followed by a guy who was clearly chasing me. The tour guide pulled back his arm and let his brick fly straight and true. I heard it hit my pursuers. head with a loud, hollow clunk, and he just sort of dropped to the floor like a discarded sack of potatoes. The tour guide said it was better that we got out of here because something was clearly going down, so he and the other guide led us down some more side streets and away from what he explained was turning into a full-scale riot. I asked if we should tell the cops about the guys

who tried to assault me, and he just sort of laughed. We made it back to the hotel, which was gated and had armed guards. The next day, the next day. day, it was time for the tour group to move on anyway, and we spent the rest of the vacation at a luxury resort near the pyramids, where we lounged by the pool, relaxed, and went on various day trips to ancient historic sites of interest. Now, I love Egypt, and like I say, I've been back there since, but this was the most terrifying experience I've ever had, and one that could have changed my life, all because some people see others as less than human. Many, many years ago now, her son was barely out of diapers.

Me and my kid's mom moved into a real nice duplex out in the suburbs. It was on a quiet street, and the neighbors were quite friendly, and some even actually came over to help us unpack. Now, the guy in the home next door didn't show up, but when we heard that he was some elderly widower who didn't get around so easily anymore, we obviously gave him an instant pass. Now, our son, Luke, loved the big backyard and pool that we now had. He loved his new bedroom too, but what he didn't love was the big old closet with its sliding wooden doors.

He seemed almost cautious of it right away. But then a few nights after we settled in, Luke started acting very strange about his new closet. At first he said that he wanted to keep it open, so he could see that there were no monsters in there. But then later, he said that he wanted to sleep with the clothes because someone was inside the closet and they would watch him whenever we left him alone. I thought that it was just the new house making him nervous, and that his big old imagination was just getting the better of him. And so that night, to help him feel safe,

I started what became a regular bedtime routine. Every night I checked his closet for monsters, I opened the doors, rustled his clothes a little, and showed him how aside from them, it was completely empty. I'd then shut the closet, tuck him in the bed, and then maybe sit in the chair and read him a bedtime story until he fell asleep. It worked for him, and he slept like the dead from that on. But for me, that feeling of unease never entirely went away.

Something about Luke's fear stuck in my mind, how sort of primal and authentic it actually seemed. His mom said it was probably nothing, just a father worrying too much about his over-imaginative son. But still, I kept checking the closet every night during, our little routine, which I increasingly realized wasn't for him anymore. It was for me. A little time went by, maybe two or three months, and I decided to give Luke's room a deep clean. The house was old, the kind of place where dust settled just about everywhere, so I vacuumed the carpet, wiped all the windows down, and cleaned under his bed, too. And then once I was done, I moved to the closet. As I swept the floor, I noticed something against the back wall. It was a little

pile of sawdust, maybe an inch or two tall, piled near the back wall. Since I didn't remember seeing sawdust when we moved in, I pushed Luke's clothes the side and look closer. And then in that dim light, I saw it, clear as day. A small hole in the wall near the floor, about the size of a coin. There wasn't any light coming through at the time, but it was there all right. I remember my heart rate going into overdrive as these dual feelings of disgust and anger rose up inside me. The whole looked like it went straight through, so I grabbed a flashlight and shined it inside, and that's how I figured out that there was some kind of cover on the other side, something to hide it when it wasn't in use.

But I knew someone could see through it if they removed the cover. The wall was shared with the neighbor's house, that elderly widower who lived on the other side of that duplex, I thought about them moving away the paper or card or whatever it was and watching my boy as he slept. And my hands shook as I thought about that. My son hadn't been imagining things. Someone really had been watching him. And so I sat back, staring at that hole. My head was pounding as a thousand different thoughts raced around in my mind all at once.

We never saw that widower much. He was mostly just sort of shadows moving behind curtains. but the thought of him watching my son made me feel sick to my stomach, but not just sick, angry too. I wanted to scream, to run next door and demand answers before taking some well-deserved retribution. But I stopped myself. I knew how it would end. If I confronted him, I wouldn't stay calm and I'd end up in jail for sure.

I could feel the anger building, the kind that didn't stop. I'd hurt someone or worse, for Luke's sake. I couldn't let that happen. I decided that I didn't want that guy to know that I knew if that made any sense. I wanted to try and actually catch him doing something, maybe on camera, so I had actual evidence of the crime. I went to the garage, found some wood filler in a putty knife, and then worked fast to fill it in and cover it over. I then checked the wall for other holes, and when I didn't find any, I moved loose clothes back and swept away the sawdust. The closet looked normal again, but I didn't feel any better.

What kind of person draws a hole to watch a child? And how the hell was I going to catch him in the act? My aunts clenched into angry fists every time I thought about it and I only stopped feeling murderously angry after I spoke to Luke's mom about it. And that night I checked his closet like I always did. My son didn't know about the hole and there was no way in hell that I was about to tell him on an account of not wanting to scare him. So I tucked him in, turned off the light and watched him fall asleep as usual.

But unlike him, I couldn't relax. Even though the hole was gone, I kept imagining the widower's eyes on the other side of the wall. I imagined him kneeling down and moving away the cover and cursing as he realized someone had gotten wise to his plan. A part of me thought that I'd have him backing off for a while, but I also knew that if he did it once, he was probably going to do it again. I started checking the closet more, during the day too. I'd slid the doors open and stare at the wall, waiting for something to happen. or to hear something moving on the other side, but I never saw or heard anything. And the stress of it started to affect my sleep.

I started locking the windows and back door every night and something I never did before. I told myself it was to keep my son safe, but the truth is, I was scared too. Luke's mom felt the same way. She was furious, but she also knew that it was better not to escalate, as any sort of confrontation might go very wrong and very fast. If this guy was willing to drill a hole in the wall to spy on our kid, what else was he willing to do? I never felt the same in that house afterwards, and I never felt the same about that supposedly sweet old widower either. I wanted to catch him doing something, anything to prove what I knew.

I paid to have some security cameras installed, which were super expensive compared to those ringed doorbells you can buy these days, and I thought that it'd be worth the investment, but the guy next door never did anything on any cameras. His house stayed dark with his curtains always closed. I thought about calling the police purely just to warn them that I thought our neighbor was a creep. But not only had I removed what little evidence I had, I also wasn't sure how to phrase things to avoid sounding like some paranoid a-hole bullying his elderly neighbor. I felt like an idiot, and I still do actually, but I kept quiet. I started sleeping with a baseball bat next to my bed and I told myself it was just for home defense, but deep down, I knew I was ready to use it

for home offense. If I heard someone in Luke's room, if I even so much has heard someone creeping around outside, I wasn't hesitate. I even got it excited about the idea of catching the guy, excited about the idea of smashing his head in, and that scared me almost as much as the hole. And after a couple of minutes went by and still nothing had happened, I started to relax a little. There had been no new holes, no strange noises. Luke hadn't talked about being watched in a while, and the only disturbed sleeps we got were when we'd had an unrelated nightmare. The routine definitely helped a lot in that continual process of checking the closet before tucking him in,

but I never stopped checking that wall. I'd run my hand over the spot where the hole was, making sure it was still sealed, but it always was. And then one day I saw a truck outside the widower's house. No goodbye. high, no explanation, and the house stayed empty, and it took a while, but we actually heard that he'd passed away. And as horrible as it is to say, I actually felt relief. The hole was gone, and so was the sicko who put it in there.

But the fact that it even happened in the first place, that there's people out there who'd think to do something like that, that's something I'll never be able to come to terms with. This is a story I tell my buds for a laugh sometimes, but I only laugh about it because Otherwise, you'd bloody cry, you know. Everything turned out okay, but honestly at the time, I thought my entire life was over, and I'd spent the rest of my days rotting in a Dutch jail. So it all started because me and a mate, Milo, got really into mopeds.

We both got mopeds while we were still in school. While the rest of our friends were learning to drive cars, we smugly declared that our little scooters were the most cost-effective, sensible option in anyone who pissed all their money into the tank of a force, Peter Gas-Guzzler was a right chump. After school, we graduated from just having our CBT, a learner's permit for mopeds, to actually passing our motorcycle tests. We were living large, riding our mopeds around town like a lame British McElmore

that song he did about mopeds, downtown, which was ironically our theme song, if you want to picture exactly the kind of insufferable twats that we were back then. Now, one day, Milo excited. showed me a video that he'd found online, advertising a group Moped trip from Poland to the Netherlands. I didn't quite understand the deal at first, but as I watched the video, it seemed like we'd go on a cross-continent moped tour with a group as part of a documentary they were filming. Not only would we get to embark on the trip of a lifetime, but it would cost us almost nothing. As long as we could get ourselves there, we'd be provided with room, board, and moped rental every step of the way.

I was a bit sad to have to leave my beloved Vespa behind in the UK, but as for the rest, you could not sniff at that at all. Milo was incredibly enthusiastic about it, too. And looking back, I didn't really have the time to pause and wonder if there was some kind of catch. And by the time my girlfriend Jane suggested it seemed too good to be true, I was already fully on board and committed to the idea. So I didn't really want to find any excuses to back out of the trip. I didn't do my due diligence and look into Pete. the guy organizing the tour. Milo said that he had, though, and everything was totally on level,

so, hey, why wouldn't I believe my childhood best friend? We flew to Poland a couple of months later, and honestly, I'd be lying if I said that the trip wasn't great. It was our first time going on a foreign holiday, and we really relished it. The mophead journey from Poland to the Netherlands was great fun, even if it took some getting used to riding a different machine, and me, Milo, and the three other guys and Pete,

all got on really well. After some days of fun, frolics and breakneck moped driving, we pulled into the parking lot of the hotel we were going to be staying at in the Netherlands. Immediately it was very obvious that this was a brothel. And I shot Milo a look. This is not what we'd agreed upon. Jane would certainly not be okay with me staying in a damn brothel. Luckily for Jane, she wouldn't have to worry about it. We parked up our mopeds outside, climbed off and then suddenly floodlights slammed on in the darkness and loud voices were yelling. I didn't understand what was being said, but as a group of armed cops stormed into view, I understood the premise. Get down on the ground with your hands above your head.

I complied, but I was almost laughing. This had to be some kind of misunderstanding. There was no reason why I should be getting arrested by armed cops. My confidence remained as they forced open the seats of our mopeds and threw our stuff to the ground. Some changes of clothes I'd stashed under the seat, nothing of note. One of the officers yanked the backpack off my back and emptied the contents onto the ground. I watched in dawning horror as an armed cop snatched up my passport and pocketed it. Then another cop began slicing open the seats of the mopeds. That's when my confidence really dissipated.

I stared open-mouthed as they pulled two duct-tape packages out of the seat cushioning that I'd spent the last few days sitting on. I didn't have to ask to know what I'd been sitting on, though. Struggling to look around at Milo, who was being nailed on by a cop, the look on his face caused my heart to completely sink. The absolute imbecile was not at all surprised to see the drugs. My best friend had implicated me in a freaking cocaine smuggling operation without my knowledge. No wonder it had been too good to be true. No wonder Pete was such a nice guy. I'd known Milo had a few dodgy contacts and dabbled in very light dealing back at home,

but I had no idea he'd done anything like this. Protesting my innocence did not help, though, as I was dragged into a waiting paddy wagon and then booked and processed in a Dutch jail. and thrown into a single cell where I had nothing to do but sit, fret, and poop myself in fear, not literally. I'd never even been in trouble with the law before, and the idea that I could genuinely be going to prison that I had actually committed a serious crime, even unwittingly. The next few days were a blur of terror and anxiety.

I could not make an international call to let Jane know what was going on. I could not get a hold of Milo and wring that idiot's neck while demanding he explained things. All I could do was talk to a couple of Dutch cops who barely spoke English, but knew just enough to tell me that I was in a whole heap of trouble. In the end, it was Pete who proved to be my savior, even if he was the ringleader and the guy to blame in the first place. Milo clammed up, refusing to say anything in my defense, but in the end Pete spilled everything and cut some kind of deal where he ratted it.

out his suppliers. Part of the deal involved telling them that myself and two of the three other guys were just clueless Patsies brought along to drive the extra mopeds. Only Pete, Milo, and a third guy, Jacob were actually part of the drug smuggling. The day that a guy from the UK embassy came to visit me in my cell and told me I was going home, I genuinely fell to my knees and wept. I went home and hugged my mom and dad and had a bang-up Sunday roast. My homecoming to Jane wasn't quite so grand, though. I don't think she ever quite believed me that I wasn't involved in the criminal enterprise, and honestly, that really hurt.

I'd never done anything to make her distrust me, and after six months of constant jibes and jokes about my complicity, I couldn't stand it anymore, and we actually ended up breaking up. Even though the Dutch law accepted that I had no knowledge of the drug smuggling, I was still deported and banned from entering the Netherlands for ten years. That time's just up about now, and not sure why I'd ever want to go back, though, unless for some reason I wanted to visit Milo, who's still serving two more years on his sentence. I have no sympathy for that, idiot.

Even after Pete spilled the beans, Milo pleaded not guilty and got a much longer sentence because of it. It's like the American Wesley Snipes said, some mother lovers always trying to drive a moped up a hill. About 20 years ago now, my wife and I decided that we need more room for our family, so we picked out a house for sale that was within our budget and then went through the process of purchasing it and moving in. Now to us, the house was perfect for ourselves and our two kids named Lily and Max. They loved their new bedrooms, they loved the backyard and its outdoor pool, and it was actually western facing too so we could sit out there and enjoy the sunset every night.

and the neighborhood was quiet with friendly people who waved if they passed while I was mowing the front lawn. And it felt like our own little slice of paradise, a place where nothing bad could really happen. We were happy and I thought that we'd found our forever home. Now weeks and weeks went by and everything stayed great. The kids played in the yard while my wife got accustomed to the new kitchen, and I was as happy as all heck with the size in the new garage. We felt very safe, like pretty much nothing could do. touch us. But one night, everything changed. It was late and the house was dark. The kids were asleep.

Emma was in bed reading and I was about to lock the front doors when I heard a loud noise outside. It was sort of a soft thud, like something heavy hitting the door. I kept on listening for a minute or two and then when I didn't hear anything else, I told myself it was nothing, maybe just a car's trunk slamming in the distance. I went over to the back of that. I went over to the back the house to lock the back doors and that's when I heard the footsteps. They were heavy and they were only getting louder, but before I could move, the door in front of me crashes open. After being thrown back, I saw the men rush in. They were wearing black with her faces hidden behind mass. They carried flashlights and bags and one even had some type of blunt object like a crowbar.

And my legs felt weak, but I couldn't run. I had to protect my family. and the second they saw me they rushed forward there were four of them tall very well built he pushed me into the living room as my wife stood at the top of the stairs looking pale and frightened Lily and Max woke up and ran to join her, and I wanted to tell them to run, to hide, but my voice couldn't work. It was like a dream. The men ordered my wife and kids downstairs, too, and they shoved us onto the couch. They then stood over us with those flashlights that were bright, blinding us, which I guess was kind of part of their plan. Finally, one of them stepped closer. He was the tallest, and his mask was black with holes for his eyes and mouth, and he'd leaned down, so close that I could smell his stinking breath. He didn't speak, but his eyes were burned

into mine. Another man, shorter with a red mess, started pacing back and forth. He kicked over some lamp and it shattered on the floor. The sound started to make Lily Cry and Emma pulled her closer. The tall one grabbed my shirt and pulled me to my feet. His flashlight was shining in my face and I squinted trying to see. The others circled us. They were like wolves circling prey. The men wanted something, something specific, but I didn't have much, only enough to start our new life. But that didn't seem to deter them. They carried on, searching, tearing through drawers and shelves, throwing books and dishes to the floor. One of them with a kind of greenish mask found a picture of us at the beach. He stared at it, and then at me. His head was tilted like he was

confused. The tall one grabbed my arm again, harder this time. He shook me and I stumbled. Emma screamed and Max clung to her, his face buried in her side. I wanted to fight, to push them away, but there were too many and they were too strong. The tall one dragged me to the kitchen. He threw me against the counter and pain shot through my ribs as I slammed into it. The others brought Emma and the kids forcing them to sit on the floor. Louis was sobbing now, and Max's eyes were huge like he didn't understand what was happening. I didn't either, but I had to try and stay strong for them, no matter how hard that was. The men started ripping open cabinets, pulling out pots and pants.

They weren't looking for food or money. They were looking for something else, something we didn't have, but they seemed damn sure that it was there. I remember how the short one and the greenish mass suddenly stopped. and pulled one of our kitchen knives from the block that held it. Emma gasped and I felt sick. The knife was long and sharp, and as he held it close to her face, my hand shook and my legs were feeling like jelly. The tall one grabbed me again, his fingers digging into my arm.

He leaned close and his mask was brushing my cheek, and I could hear his breathing, very fast and heavy. They wanted something that was hidden, but they didn't say what, and I didn't know what they meant. We had no gold, no jewels, no valuable secrets hidden anywhere. That was a brand new home, our new start. All the money we had in the world was in its foundations, not in the walls or the closets. I tried to think, to remember if we found anything strange in that house, but nothing could come to mind.

Just boxes and paint cans and old furniture from the last owners. I told the men that much, but they didn't believe a word of what I'd said. The one with a knife stepped closer to Emma and my world started to go dark. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't let them hurt her or the kids. The man in the green mask stopped again. He was looking at the picture, then at us. He grabbed the tall one's arm and pointed at me.

They stepped back, their heads close together. I couldn't hear them, but they were arguing in whispers before one of them suddenly said, Shut this up! It's not here! The tall one shook his head, but the green masked man kept pointing. He picked up another picture, one of us moving in, and stared at it. His shoulders were slumped, and he dropped the picture. The others froze, watching the two guys argue.

Then suddenly they backed away. The tall one let go of me and I fell to my knees. The man with a knife lowered it, stepping back. They looked at each other, and then at us. And then without a word, they turned and walked out no face. faster than they'd come in. The house was silent, except for my daughter's sobs and my heavy breathing. Emma crawled over to me and we held the kids tight.

My hands were shaking as I checked them for cuts and bruises and everyone was okay. We were just terrified. I called the police. They came pretty quickly. Their lights were flashing through the windows as we went out to meet them. They searched the house and the yard and the street outside. They found footprints in the mud, but that was pretty much it. These men were gone.

The police asked questions, wrote things down, and promised to look for them. But from what I told them, and I agreed with this, they said it was a mistake, that the men thought we were someone else. Maybe the last owners, maybe someone with some valuables hidden somewhere, but they didn't know who. The police never found the men, no one was arrested, and we fixed the broken lamp and cleaned up the mess. The house didn't feel like paradise anymore. Emma stopped humming all cheerfully in the kitchen and the kids didn't really want to play outside anymore. We locked the doors, checked the windows, and slept with the lights on. And I started keeping a gun in the bedside drawer just in case.

The neighborhood stayed very quiet and nobody else was hurt. But I really couldn't shake the fear. Watching out the windows and the doors and that dark driveway out front, I wanted to protect my family to make our homes safe again in all the ways I'd failed the first time. But deep down, I knew that it would never feel the same. Paradise was gone, and all we had left were the memories and that endless fear. Me and my missus are writing to you today to tell you about an absolutely messed up trip to the United Kingdom that we took a few years ago. It was just after COVID travel restrictions had been lifted, so we were itching to stretch our legs and visit a foreign country.

So we picked somewhere as far away from home as possible. We didn't really have a plan for our UK holiday. It seemed like a nice place, so we opened up a map of Britain, stuck it on the dartboard at the bar that I co-owned with my brother, and I threw a dart at it. Well, we missed, and I would have had to vacation in the Bristol Channel, so we threw another one and landed on Sussex. We didn't know anything about Sussex,

and apparently it's not really a massive tourist destination, but we picked the funniest-sounding place that also seemed a bit tourist-y, Bogner Regis. We figured if it was crap, it wouldn't be too hard to shoot up to London early, which we plan to do for the second half of the holiday regardless. Bogner Regis was actually great. We hit the town in July, dead in the middle of the Australian winter, and despite what we'd heard about the UK, the weather was Bonzer. Me and the missus spent our day's sunbathing on the beach, buying crap from the seafront stores and getting sunburnt. Then, at night, we hit the bars and the clubs and tried her best to paint the quiet seaside town red.

We made a bunch of friends at Bogner Regis, other tourists from all over the world, like Detroit, Belgium, Turkey, Birmingham, all sorts. One fellow that we met, he said his name was Rishi, like the then Prime Minister, which we all found really funny. Rishi was a wild party animal, and it was with Rishi that we got so drunk one night that we found ourselves lost in the middle of the countryside, unsure how to get back to Bogner Regis. Me and the Missis were both absolutely wrecked, and we lost track of Rishi altogether. We were out in the middle of nowhere, with no idea how we'd even managed to get there. I have a vague memory of riding in a van with Rishi and some other guys drinking cheap beer, but now me and the Misses were walking along a country road in the dark, singing God Save the Queen.

Rest in peace, Liz. Eventually we came across a 24-hour petrol station and a service station. There was a coast of coffee, but it was closed, and the McDonald's staffed by a very bored-looking teenage boy. We bought some munchies and then wandered to the gas station to see if they had the number for a local taxi firm or some type of ride. The guy at the counter directed us to a notice board, which we struggled to read in our drunken state, but eventually found a business card from someone offering taxi services 24 hours a day. I called it up on my mobile, and a very polite young woman answered. I told her where we were at, described the service station, and she said that she knew exactly

where to send a driver. She told us to look out for a silver Ford and that our driver would be named Mears. Half an hour later, a car pulled into the petrol station lot, and a shifty-looking bloke gestured us over. I asked if he was Mears, and he said, sure, why not? Now, looking back, I can't be sure if we got into the right car. It's hard to get it clear in my head whether I'm just remembering things wrong or whether we really were this careless with getting into a car with a stranger.

Either way, Mears or whoever this crooked Bogan was, did not have our best interests at heart. It wasn't immediately obvious. We had no bloody clue where we were, so we had no bloody clue that Mears was driving us in the total opposite direction to. to Bognor Regis. And by now, my missus had passed out and was snoring against my shoulder. I tried to make conversation with Mears from the back seat, but he suddenly pretended that he couldn't speak English.

Weird, I thought. He'd understood me perfectly earlier. Or maybe I'd been so drunk that I'd just sort of slurred nonsense at him and he'd just sort of gone along with it. When we pulled up to a stop, I knew we definitely weren't in Bognar Regis. We were in the courtyard of some broken-down, filthy farmhouse that looked like it hadn't been lived in for years. Still, I saw a chicken run across the dirt in the darkness and at least one goat peering at me eerily from beyond a fence. Lovely, I thought.

Mears got out of the car and yelled something into the darkness. A dog began to bark furiously in a male voice called back. I peered through the front windscreen from the backseat, squinting into the darkness, and saw two fellas. join Mears. Mears had his window down, so I could hear them, even though I don't think he knew that I could hear them. Fear gripped me as I realized what they were talking about. Mears was saying that we were rich American tourists. We're Australians, you wanker, I wanted to yell, and that nobody knew where we were, so they could just do us over and dump us and the acid vats out back. Bloody Nora, I thought. I didn't much fancy that either. And neither did one of the men,

because he vehemently disagreed with Mears, slapping him around on the back of the head even. And at first I thought this meant Mears had been kidding around, but no. The other man said that they just wanted to do me in, but the missus should be handed over to Osama and his boys, and they'd know what to do with her. I swear on my old dad's grave, when I heard Osama, I thought that they were just lyricans. But then Mears said something like, sure, maybe they would hook us up with some of their fine. and then a derogatory term that implied that he was talking about very young women. Next, I saw the glint of steel as one of the men unsheathed some huge blade. Right, this could totally ruck off.

Machetes, grooming gangs, a mate he called Osama? Nah, bloody likely, not for me and the missus. And I didn't even think. Drunk is an absolute skunk. I clambered into the front of the Ford Escort. The Lord God Above must have been looking after me that. night because Mears the moron I'd left his freaking keys in the ignition. For a second, I thought I was going to have a classic horror movie moment where the engine wouldn't take over and the car wouldn't

start. But now, luck was on my side. I gunned the engine and drove straight forward, even clipping Mears in the leg as he dived out of the way. Somehow, despite being a terrible driver, even when sober, I managed to pull off a perfect U-turn and then send the car squealing, crashing out of the of the gate of the farmyard and onto the darkened country roads. I pushed that battered old Ford escort to its absolute peak, breaking the speed limit for a good 20 minutes, hoping and praying that I'd encountered the law so they could pull me over and I could tell them everything.

Eventually I remembered the missus in the back. The lucky bird had slept through the entire thing and only now just started stirring, muttering and asking where we were and then telling me to slow down. Eventually we found our way to a little village which had a 24-hour Tesco. Both our phones had run out of battery at some point in the night, so we went inside, and I told the poor old deer on the checkout that we'd almost been kidnapped by a grooming gang and could we possibly borrow the phone.

I'd sobered up quite a bit by now, and I imagine I was still a total mess, and the missus was still rad-arced. A long story short, the cops came, they searched some farmhouses in the area, that could match the description I gave, but they didn't find anyone. And the car that we'd acquired had stolen plates, and had been reported stolen a few years before. The cops impounded it, and for all I know, it's still in some impound lot today. The name Mears was apparently the name of a local taxi driver, and had not been the guy whose car we'd gotten into.

They were able to verify that the real Mears showed up at the petrol station shortly after we got into the wrong Ford. The cops did confirm one chilling fact, though. Osama was the first name of a suspect in a grooming gang case in the area. Unfortunately, our testimony didn't really help anything with that case, but I hope to God they got him. Me and the Missis got off pretty lightly, all told. I still have friends who to this day insist that I got so drunk I imagined this whole thing, but I have copies of the police reports as a souvenir from our time in Bogner Regis to prove it.

and I can only wish total ill-will upon the men who intended to kill us, especially fake mears. I hope it hurt when I hit you with your own car, and if you ever come to Australia, I'll happily feed you till a kangaroo, you toss her. Back in the 2000s, I went on a girl's trip to Crete. For the most part, it was absolutely awesome, especially for a history nerd like me. I loved exploring all the ruins, taking in the local history, and hanging out on the beach. And unlike at home, it was totally fine to sun-bays. topless, so my pale ass didn't have to end up with an awful tan line like I usually did on vacation.

In theory, anyway. Of course, I was actually way too shy to do that, but it was nice to know that I could have if I wanted to. I mentioned this because it's irrelevant that I'm kind of a wallflower. I don't really like being the center of attention or doing any wild things. I'm not a party girl, never have been. At the time of this vacation, I was just out of college, and I'd still never even been drunk. I drank a glass of wine or two with dinner, but that was the extent of it. I was much more at home among the ancient stones of Greece than I was in the clubs,

even if that was the main purpose of this holiday. I was the sensible one of the group, the designated driver, the sober Sally, and I was okay with this. I'd still go out on the town with the other girls, but I'd be the one to head back to the hotel by 10 p.m. And then awake to see the sunrise. All this to say, when I went to some Cretan brink, ruins with one of my friends Nora, and we met a couple of local brothers who offered us something

to drink. I made them swear on Zeus that it wasn't alcoholic. For one thing, it was early afternoon. For another, I wanted to keep a clear head on because I was planning on exploring some subterranean tunnels in the ruins, and they weren't entirely safe. We'd met the boys in the town the night before, and they had construction permits for the area, which wasn't entirely open to the public. They assured me that the bitter purple drink was a local recipe, a natural energy drink made from dandelions and other plants. At any other time, I would not accept strange drinks from strange men, but we were also accompanied by the brother's grandparents and a sweet and lovely old couple who also assured me that the drink was not alcoholic, and would simply give me the energy and drive to explore the ruins.

Obviously, it's clear from the setup that there was something wrong with the drink, but to this day I'm certain that the family didn't intend there to be anything wrong with it. They just didn't consider the fact that their beloved family recipe might require a bit of acclimatization for an American tourist who isn't used to drinking something that contains Datora. For those who don't know, Datora is a somewhat poisonous plant that can be used as a recreational hallucinogen. Later, the family told me that they only used a pinch of Datora in their drink to give it a kick. But I barely even drank one. wine, let alone hallucinogens or poison. On top of that, I was unknowingly suffering from mild sunstroke.

I'd spent all morning in the sun at the ruins, and I'd mostly only been drinking this bitter dandelion and datora juice, so I was sunstruck and absolutely dehydrated. All of this was a recipe for disaster when I went down into the tunnels under the ruins, armed only with a flashlight, and decided that I could absolutely manage it alone. It didn't take long for it. It didn't take long for me to start panicking. It was cooler underground, but there were strange sounds. Soon I'd lost sight of any natural sunlight and only had my flashlight to guide me. I started sensing something was wrong soon after that. Whirls and chips in the rock began to form words and pictures in the darkness. I paused for five entire minutes, reading some ancient writing on the wall that suddenly

turned back into meaningless rock texture. And next, I was certain that I could feel hot, animal breath on my neck. I spun around and of course nothing was there. Somehow, I got it into my mind that the ghost of a minotar was down here with me, an invisible minotar ghosts, and I began to run down the corridors, as if that would somehow help if it was in fact a ghost. I ended up just getting myself more lost and then heard scraping and the skittering of small stones. I shone my flashlight down the corridor and a small minotaur with a hairy face. was standing there. At least, that's what I saw him as in my sun-stroke-addled Datorre-brained state. The Minotaur began to advance towards me, snorting and growling at me. A voice in the back

my mind was telling me that I was hallucinating. I couldn't possibly actually be seeing a Minotar. It was an invisible ghost Minotaur after all. So I stood my ground and shone my flashlight at the creature and waited for it to pass through me and disappear. Instead, The Minotar reached out and grabbed me. Stinking foul wine breath washed over me as the beast bore down on me. And for some reason, the Minotaur wore a filthy fisherman's coat and fishing pants too. And he had gumboots on and a beard and a knitted cap and was also an old man. Yeah, this wasn't a Minotaur.

It was a hobo lurking around in the ruins. And now he had his hands on me. My head was spinning, and colors were flashing around the tunnel like I was in a magic abyss. The hobo minotaur clacked his teeth at me and slobbered down his beard, and I felt him grabbing at the waist of my pants. Hell no, buddy. I raised the flashlight up over my head and brought it down on his forehead with a crack. This caused this hobo minotar to howl in enraged pain and let go of me, but it also caused the flashlight's beam to weaken quite considerably. I shoved the hobo roughly against a wall and ran past him, trying to follow the route that I was sure that I'd taken. And it was a chase sequence worthy of an actual slasher movie, not least because the hobo managed to grab me a couple of times and tear my shirt a bit.

Thankfully, nothing revealing, and I would have been mortified, as we've already established. It was just enough to make me look kind of badass when I came running out of the tunnels, screaming that I was being chased by a freaking minotaur. And holy crap, someone call Olympus because there was an actual monster after me. Nora grabbed me and shook me and asked me what was really wrong. Nora had been drinking the Datorra drink too, but didn't seem to be affected by it in the same way I was, maybe because she was used to alcohol and also didn't have sunstroke. I tried to explain that there was a beast, but then the hobo came charging out of the tunnel

screaming and yelling. Later, our Greek friends wouldn't translate exactly what he'd said, but told me that it was obscene. The hobo rushed at me and grabbed me, throwing me to the ground and flipping me over. Nora punched him, and I kicked, squabbling backwards away from him as he reeled back. The Greek guys we were with came running over, and one of them grabbed the hobo and threw him backwards. He stumbled across the area, hitting a pillar hard with his arm. Some debris dislodged from the top of the pillar and fell straight onto his shoe. shoulder, sending him crashing to the ground. I heard an absolute sickening crunch of bone as the

rock pinned him down, and for a moment I almost felt bad for him, until I remembered what he'd clearly been trying to do to me in those tunnels. The elderly couple told the grandsons to take us back to our hotel, and that they'd call the cops and get the hobo arrested for trespassing. They said it was better that we didn't let them know that we'd been in the ruins because we weren't strictly supposed to be there, and the Greek police can be a bit volatile. As much I didn't... That said, it was better that we didn't let them know that we'd been in the ruins, because we weren't strictly supposed to be there, and the Greek police can be a bit volatile. As much as I didn't want the hobo to get away with assaulting me, I was still very dizzy and confused from

whatever was affecting me, and also judging from the state of the hobo in his crushed arm. He wouldn't be trying to assault anyone else anytime soon. I slept off the heat exhaustion and Datora poisoning, and the next day we had a conversation with these Greek brothers in which we worked out that the Datora and the cocktail was the likely culprit for my hallucinations, if you haven't already figured it out. And in some ways, I think their strange concoction actually helped. It gave me the energy to fight back against this hobo and escaped through the tunnels, and maybe if I'd been faced with the dark reality of the situation down in those ruins,

I might have fallen apart and been unable to escape. On the other hand, maybe if I wasn't high on Datora and actually had heat stroke, I might not have gone into a labyrinth alone in the first place. But really, who can say? I've got a story about Canada that I want to share with you. My family and I are from Kentucky. There's me, my wife Ellie, my 20-year-old daughter, my 15-year-old son, and my 9-year-old daughter. We go on vacation to Europe most years, but last year,

we decided that it was finally time to get really exotic and head to Canada. We sit on a small village near the Boreal Forest and went about researching the perfect Airbnb to rent for a week of wilderness tranquility and enjoyment. My wife found the perfect place, very affordable too, and we booked it. A few months later, I headed up to marry Canada with a fam in tow. My son Elijah spent the entire journey playing on his switch and wouldn't pay attention to the beautiful natural countryside. But my wife and daughters were awestruck, and so was I. I hadn't been to Canada in many years and was bringing back a lot of fond memories. We arrived at the Airbnb,

a stunning woodland property just off from the nearby village. The key was meant to be just inside this digital lock box attached to the front of the house, but as we pulled up and got out, it was pretty clear that the box was hanging open. Great start. I tried the front door and and it was locked, of course. Well, no problem. Thankfully, there was cell perception at the property, so I called up the number that we had for the owners, but no answer.

Great again. Seconds later, we heard footsteps crunching under the driveway. An elderly couple waved to us and asked if we'd been calling them. They introduced themselves as the owners of the property and apologized if they were running late. They had the key with them, and they could let us right on in. They were an odd-looking person, hair, I guess. The husband introduced himself as an ex-cop in his 70s, and he reminded me of one of the

sort of weble toys from when I was a kid. Weble wobbles, but won't fall down, you know the ones? He was completely hairless, like shiny, bald, and free of eyebrows, but he had a huge, huge, bushy beard that I kept staring at because I was certain it was a wig. Is that what you call a fake beard? To this day, I don't even know, and the icing on the cake was his name. He said his name was Gerald Garibaldi. And I began to laugh when he said this, but my wife kind of elbowed me, and Gerald Garibaldi looked slightly excited as if he had no idea what the joke was. And the wife introduced herself as Maureen Garbaldi, and the hair on her face wasn't a wig.

It was unfortunate, but Maureen Garbaldi had a few thick whiskers sprouting from her chin and a very prominent female mustache that looked like it hadn't been waxed since pretty much ever. Not that she had any obligation to actually wax, of course, but needless to say that they were a very odd-looking couple. My eldest, Cindy, and Elliot, were elbowing each other sort of whispering and laughing, and it was all I could do to keep a straight face when my youngest, Amy, kept asking what was so funny. Maureen was in her 60s and wore a flowery summer dress that was kind of obscenely short. She had a long white socks on and those black shiny shoes that, honest-to-god, schoolgirls wear. and I'm ashamed to say that the pair of them kind of unsettled me.

Jared and Marine Garibaldi led us into the house, and then very kindly gave us a tour that somehow managed to last nearly two hours. Then they very kindly helped us bring our luggage in from the car, and then kindly helped us unpack the kitchen things and food and other essentials, and then kindly sat there like eager puppies, clearly waiting for us to invite them to stay for dinner. It was the first night of our freaking vacation, though, I really didn't want those weirdos encroaching on our family time, but, hey, what could I do?

They were very kind. And that phrase became a running joke because the Garibaldi's continuously told us that we were very kind for this and that thing. Over dinner, Gerald Garibaldi talked and talked and talked and the rest of us could just do nothing but listen. And the crazy thing is, I couldn't really tell you what he talked about. He just rambled about nothing and everything. Politics, movies, music, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, cancel culture, the youth of today, animated violence, and those damn video games, all sorts of stuff. But I could not tell you a single thing he actually said or a single opinion he actually had. It was like the man was talking total gibberish, just saying snippets of things that made some sense or could pertain to something,

but just didn't really fit together in any cohesive manner. And at one point he was talking about how Trump was the worst thing to happen to the country in years. But then five seconds later, he was calling him the greatest damn president the country's ever seen. He kept bringing up Angela Merkel, too, saying what an ugly troll she was. And Ellie and I fought to keep a straight face because I swear up and down, Marine Garibaldi could have been Angela Merkel's long-lost twin, separated at birth. Now imagine Angela Merkel dressed like a Lolita, I was told, and divas apologies for the image.

But that was Maureen Garibaldi, and don't ask me how I know any of that stuff. They were honestly like something from that weird show on TLC. I genuinely wanted to look around for hidden cameras. I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Surely we were being pranked. Unfortunately, things didn't stay comical for very long. After dinner, the Garibaldi's made themselves comfortable in the living room

and turned the TV on. I took Elliot into the other room and asked her what the hell we were going to do. Amy was almost crying because she wanted to play board games, and Elliot and Cindy had already left to explore the outskirts of the forest before the sun had fully set. In the end, I had to very politely ask the Garibaldis if they would mind leaving for the night and letting us settle in. I expected them to display that Canadian embarrassment in a sort of awshucks energy, but instead, Gerald Garibaldi decided to square up to me. He pushed me in the chest and accused me of being an ungrateful guest.

They had allowed us into their abode after all, and how dare we simply ask them to leave? What right did I have to try and throw a man out of his own home, especially after dinner? It started to dawn on me that these freaks did not realize how Airbnb was supposed to work. I mean, surely they realized that they were meant to leave the house while we stayed in it. And I gently tried to ask this, and they acted furious. Again, I almost thought that we were being pranked. Maybe this was one of those dumb YouTube things. But then Maureen began outright howling and crying and accusing us of being home invaders. I could not believe what I was hearing. When she threw some pretty vile slurs at Ellie,

that's when I knew that this was definitely not a joke. I drew the line there. This had been funny for an evening, but it was beginning to ruin our much-needed vacation. And moreover, they were upsetting Amy and nobody speaks to my wife like that. I have no idea, but demand that this couple leave their own property or I'd call the police. I wasn't even sure if this could fly legally, but what choice did I have? I could put a complaint in the Airbnb the next day, and if we had to find a nice hotel in the town over, then that would suck, but so be it. Surprisingly, the Garibaldi seemed terrified at the idea of me calling the cops. They heaved their considerable bulks off the couch and stormed out. Now I watched them leave, stamping their way around the outside of the

house and into the forest. Now minutes later, Elliot came back in. I filled him in on what he'd missed and told him that the Garibaldis were unhinged and not to let them in if they came back. Elliot agreed and then asked where Cindy was. My heart sank. I thought she'd been with him. Elliot said she had been, but that she'd headed back to the house ahead of him because she needed to use the bathroom. Ellie was upstairs putting Amy to bed, so Elliot and I rushed outside to try and find Cindy. She was in a clearing with the Jerobaldis. As I approached, I saw that Maureen was holding a damn shovel. As I got closer, I could hear what Gerald was saying.

He was trying to persuade my 20-year-old daughter to come back with them to their house and have some sexy times with them. Cindy, who hadn't been present during the blow-up, was doing her best to be nice and not offend them, and I'm so proud of her for that. She was clearly worried about the shovel Maureen was holding, though, despite not knowing how volatile and weird this couple really was. I snuck out behind Maureen and grabbed the shovel from her hands. I told Cindy to get behind me, and that she didn't have to put up with this crap from these utter freaks. Marine screamed at me, telling me that my family wasn't safe, and that they'd booby-trapped the

house, and that there was a carbon monoxide leak that would poison us all in our sleep, and that they'd rigged the house to kill us. It was absolutely insane. I had no idea what we could do. There was no way that we could stay overnight in that house when the owners were this nuts. For the moment, I told Cindy to take Elliot back into the house. Then I kind of threatened the Garibaldis with a shovel, making sure they backed off and left the property. Once I was sure they waddled far enough away, I went back into the house.

Inside, Ellie met me with some incredibly bizarre news. While I'd been out there dealing with the Jerobaldi's, she'd received a phone call on the Airbnb's landline. It was the owners, asking if we'd arrived okay in calling to wish us a pleasant stay. Of course, Elliot told them that we'd spent an evening with the supposed owners, and my wife described the couple who'd intruded on our Canadian vacation. The actual owners, the Maca Voice, told us to keep the door locked and that they'd be over with law enforcement shortly. Now, sure enough, ten minutes later, a station wagon and a police cruiser pulled into the driveway,

and that's how we met the real and very lovely owners of that Airbnb. There's a simple, if crazy explanation for what had happened. The Garibaldes, which was not their real name, of course, were the neighbors of the Maccaboys who'd been enraged on a land boundary dispute with them for years. They'd always been quietly resentful of the Macavoys, and always been an annoying but minor thorn in their side. When the Macavoys bought a second property on the other side of the Jerobaldi's land, it all became too much for them, and they decided to try and sabotage.

the Maca Voice attempts at earning income through Airbnb by masquerading as the owners, the lunatic Garibaldi's, to scare away any guess. Turns out, we were the first guess, and the Garibaldi's bizarre, grudge-driven plan almost worked. The utter weirdos had even managed to spy on the Maca Voice to see the keypad code for the electronic lock and helped themselves to the key. Unfortunately, that was the only real crime they'd committed, and even then it was their word against the McAvoy's that they hadn't actually been told the key code. However, the Jerobaldis whose real names I won't use just in case were known as menaces and

troublemakers to local law enforcement who were only too happy to put the scares on them enough that we had a mostly peaceful stay for the rest of our vacation. Which, I will add, the McAvoy's gave us a severe discount on, meaning that for the most part, we got to spend a beautiful, tranquil vacation on the outskirts of the boreal forest for half the normal asking price. I say for the most part because there was one final scary incident before we left. When the day we were packing up to head out, after having had a great time, I was downstairs with Cindy packing up the kitchen. We heard a crash from the living room and ran next door to see that a stone had been hurled through the windows,

smeared with what I can only hope was mud. We rushed outside to see a fat figure disappearing into the trees. I let the McAvoy's know, and they informed the cops. I really hope for their sake that they installed some home security going forward. I do keep an eye on the Airbnb website to see if that property's ever been made available to vacationers again, and I've not seen it crop up since. It could be that the McAvoy's decided that it wasn't worth trying to combat the Jerobaldis, or it could just be that they're not renting through Airbnb anymore.

Either way, I wish the McAvoy's all the best. As for the bizarre, creepy couple, if you've ever come near my family again, I'll show you us U.S. folk aren't quite as forgiving as our Canadian cousins. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes

every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.